'Vertigo' Eclipses 'Citizen Kane' As Best Movie Of All Time In New BFI Survey

Alfred Hitchcock‘s 45th film has moved ahead of Orson Welles’ 1941 classic — at least according to the latest Sight & Sound poll conducted once a decade for the British Film Institute. Citizen Kane, which Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller surpassed by 34 votes out of 846 cast, is No. 2 on the list of 50 posted today (more will be posted in the weeks ahead). A decade ago Kane and Vertigo were separated by only 5 votes. Even so, Kane‘s total tally this time was three times as large as the number of votes it received last time so Welles wasn’t exactly snubbed. Out of more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles contacted for the survey, Sight & Sound received 846 Top 10 lists that among them mention 2,045 different films. The new survey also enjoyed greater participation than its six predecessors. The remaining movies in order of the BFI’s Top 10 are Ozu Yasujiro’s Tokyo Story (1953), Jean Renoir’s La Regle Du Jeu (1939) and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1939), Carl Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (1927) and Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963).